Recent reviews by Billions Must Try

The climbing is bad and the combat is really bad, so I figured I could forgive it if the stealth was really good... it's not.

I don't mind if a game is organically difficult but Styx is just really annoying. Even on the lower difficulties, guard line of sight is super sensitive and impossible to gauge. You will get caught in dark shadows, around corners, or atop platforms that would be safe in any other game in the genre. If you get caught it's almost impossible to slip away and your best option is generally to just let them kill you to respawn at your last checkpoint. From what I've read, the over-sensitivity of the guards gets WORSE, not better as the game progresses.

I've played through games like Thief, Dishonored, and the Arkham games with minimal issue and even though I'm no stealth master, I could tell that the controls and mechanics of this game were going to be user-hostile from the start.

Played for the first time, no nostalgia attached. I did NOT play with the Age of Redemption mod, which I'm told helps it out a bit.
A fairly good ARPG with some technical jank holding it back from being great.

GOOD STUFF:
+ Story was very plot driven. Almost every character was inoffensive and forgettable, and the main character is fairly one-note, but it provided an interesting-enough context that made going from A to B something to look forward to.
+ The concept is great when it works; you control a party of 4 vampires, whom you can spec in different ways, going into hack n slash dungeons, getting loot/money, going to vendors, and repeating. It has the Diablo dopamine of acquiring better and better gear/powers.
+ The 800-year time jump is something I've never seen in a game, and it isn't just scene dressing. Both the medieval and contemporary sections are given lots of love and detail and even affect how your party fights, somewhat.
+ Even after 23 years and waning fidelity, the atmosphere and art direction are still excellent, in true WoD fashion.
+ Though their efficacy is varying, there's a huge variety of weapons, armor, and magic to tool around with.
+ OST ranges from pleasant to phenomenal. My main complaint is most tracks are only a couple minutes long, and will loop pretty exhaustively in the longer levels.
+ Decapitating enemies or sucking their blood dry until they self-immolate is always great.

NOT SO GOOD:
- This game makes its B plot its A plot and its A plot its B plot. The importance they place on the main character's love interest is so shallow and baseless that it's straight out of Attack of the Clones.
- Most of the levels are like double the length they feel like they should be. They're essentially dungeons with repeating layouts and 1-3 of the same repeating enemies. For the first 20-30 minutes they're pretty cool, but after that you realize you're just cleaving through the same stuff as filler.
- Combat is dice-roll based and this has never ever ever translated well to a video game. You have to get like 2/3 through the game to begin reliably landing your attacks.
- Weird difficulty pacing/insufferable enemies. The levels jump all over the place from reasonable challenge to piss-easy to frustrating "save before every encounter" fests. The worst enemies are ones that freeze you in place or stop you from attacking entirely... Jesus Christ deliver me from the Tremere.
- The "frenzy" mechanic is effectively a death sentence for your character (and potentially more than one if he attacks his party member) that is in effect long before your health bar drains. It can be somewhat mitigated, but at a big cost to combat effectiveness.
- The game is cryptic about some things, including the controls, but ESPECIALLY the character stat sheet. I had to ford through a manual (included with the Steam copy), a tiny fan wiki, and GOG forums to figure out what each stat does. This, combined with no respec, means you can really be punished if you don't do your homework early.
- A LOT of the magic is flat-out redundant, and in general not made equal at all, and every spell costs the same amount of XP to train. With no respec and expensive spells, you do not have room to experiment to find out what works and what doesn't. Several spells do the same thing but are different tiers in their respective Discipline trees, and others sound good on paper until you try them and realize they were a huge waste of your points. They are also not cheap to cast and require a good amount of micromanagement. Speaking of:
- The real-time combat requires a lot of quick reactions and can go bad very quickly. Your bots will protect themselves somewhat, but they will also cast crappy mana-wasting spells as well. I found it only doable to have one dedicated spellcaster in each party and focused on raw combat stats for most of the other characters, especially considering the XP you get is JUST enough, and not a drop more.
- The pathing is abysmal, and one of the worst parts of the game. Your party will constantly get stuck on each other. They will die because only two of them were engaging and enemy at the same time while two others were stuck in the back row or on a door. They get stuck or caught in infinite loops on the level geometry all the time. I think this combined with the enemies that instantly remove character control/frenzy you were the worst parts of the game.
- The ranged weapons seemed generally weaker and less reliable than the melees. This is fine in the medieval era, but once you jump to the present, almost all the powerful weapons are guns and ordinance. Even if you can get them to an acceptable accuracy/damage output, you have to spend a lot of money and precious inventory space on ammo, which they burn through quickly. Only in the last couple levels of the game did I feel financially comfortable enough to fully stock everyone.
- There are two different types of shops for selling/buying stuff in each hub area, and they're always far away from each other. You have to walk very slowly between them to fully sell and stock your guys. Oh, and shop inventory resets every time you load the game. Prepare to save/reload like 10-20 times each time you go to a vendor to find what you want.
- You need to spend a lot of the game sucking blood from enemies to maintain your powers. This is inexplicably really slow, and it takes 30-60 seconds to drain a full enemy. It really adds up.
- Orsi's stupid voice


OVERALL:
I know I've listed more cons than pros, but the pros are generally sweeping and overall good tenets of the game that made me want to keep playing it. The cons are generally little things but accumulated as hundreds of little speed bumps that kept me from loving it. Some of the biggest issues like the pathing and spell balance I believe are addressed in the Age of Redemption mod, but it also rebalances a lot of the combat, so give it a bemused look. I will say it was overall worth my time and has aged immaculately compared to other games of its age.

A pretty great li'l puzzle platformer that stands out with its presentation and creativity, and is otherwised saved from being a tad cliche it's MADNESS-riddled ending.

GOOD STUFF:
+ Art style and graphics are great to look at and really convey a mood. Could maybe have used a TOUCH more color.
+ Most puzzles are tough enough to be satisfying, but even a tard like me didn't need a walkthrough. They all make sense and while they're very unique and diverse, they will probably be approachable if you apply logic from other video games.
+ There's a real relishable weight to the movement and momentum. The player character has so many subtle little twitches and animations to interact with what's currently going on, and he usually feels good to control. The way your lobotomized followers bumble and crash around is fun to watch.
+ Gameplay keeps changing itself to give you fresh new interactions. There's a submarine section that was particularly fun.
+ Soundwork is great. Very minimal score, which suits the game. Foley work is very creepy, visceral, and great.
+ The death/failure animations don't hold back. When the protagonist dies, he gets f*cking killed.
+ A reasonably interesting story is told purely through the environment. I could have used maybe 20% less vagueness about some parts though.
+ There seemed to be sort of a hackneyed dystopia element to the narrative at first especially being a vulnerable little boy in red running away from the industrialized, scary world... but that's revealed not to entirely be the case, and the final 1/4 of the game comes out of absolute nowhere and I feel cements this game's high reputation. It's not just a narrative reveal, it affects the rest of the gameplay too.

BAD STUFF:
- I really don't like to rate games by "dollars per hour," but $20 is just way too much. It's one linear campaign that took me 3 hours, and nothing else besides some achievements. I think I got this for like $6 or something. Wait for a sale.
- A couple puzzles were pretty oblique in their methodology, wherein a couple I got lucky from guesses and a couple more I tried the correct solution 2 or 3 times before it actually went through.
- The complex physics and momentum don't always follow your inputs as well as they should. I screwed up the puzzles and died a handful of times because of this. This can be extra finicky in the otherwise great ending segment.

Great game. I've played these critically lauded 2D platformers before like Limbo and Braid, and didn't really find them super fun or impressive for someone not that into the genre. For a few bucks, it's worth your time for sure.

MAKE IT FREE

Half Life 3 came out for free

Hundreds of millions of dollars to develop and can't prevent save corruption.
20 hours down the drain. Wish I could refund.

Even ignoring the bad technical performance, this game feels like a downgrade to Vermintide 2 in several ways.

GOOD STUFF:
- The gore and ragdolls from Vermintide have been significantly upgraded. Excellent weight and a huge array of dismemberment.
- OST has some real hard-hitting tracks.
- Some of the new weapons are a lot of fun to use.
- Actual outfits to unlock this time instead of lazy recolors.
- Dedicated servers (though no option to host P2P anymore)

BAD STUFF:
- Darktide has fewer than half of Verm's launch maps, 4 careers to Vermintide's 15, and about half the unique weapons per class.

- The maps: In order to get the most out of what they have, they have multiple different objective conditions that can spawn on the same map... though they are very insignificant gameplay-wise. Randomizing between hacking a computer and popping buboes does not give a recycled map much depth.

- I understand the whole "industrial hellhole" is inexorable from the source material, but the maps not only feel very samey, but are very literally dark and are overpopulated with plenty of "slummy metal and pipe" corridors. They don't feel as distinct as Verm 2 and rarely are there impression-leaving vistas like its predecessor.

- The game can't decide what it wants from its main combat loop. The advertisements made it seem like "Vermintide with a ranged focus" but you will find yourself meleeing like 60-80% of the time. This would be more tolerable if it weren't for the GLUT of needling ranged enemies. Hundreds of foes with guns who are just gonna wither through your HP no matter how well you play. Your shooting accuracy can suffer suppression aim-stagger, so being shot at by a dozen enemies just becomes that much more miserable. Safe to say I think Waystalker or Huntsman could shoot their way through this gallery with much more efficiency than even the Veteran Sharpshooter.

- Most of the elites have not only their animations but mechanics just recycled from Verm 2. There are blatant reskins of Marauders, Berserkers, Chaos Warriors, and Maulers, from what I've seen.

- The specials are a big downgrade. In Vermintide, all the specials had clear readable silhouettes, loud distinct sound effects, and loud spawn lines. In Darktide, most of the specials (Trapper, Gunner, Sniper, Shotgunner, Flamer,) are literally just "guy with gun." They are VERY easy to miss in a horde and can easily mess you up if you aren't spamming the Tag button. Other specials like the Hound or Mutant charge the player, and despite having good latency, are very unpredictable and spastic when it comes to dodging them, compared to the easily dodged disabler specials in Verm 2.

- No character cross-progression. In Vermintide 2, you still had to level the heroes individually, but you still could use Trinkets and earned Chests from your leveled character to speed them along. Sorry. If you're playing the Veteran and want to try Zealot, you're 100% doing the grind over again.

- The custom characters seemed neat at first, though I've rarely seen the "backstory" building affect their dialogue. However, the lack of specifically written characters leaves their dialogue and intrapersonal relations a lot more dry than Vermintide. The fun witty banter between Saltzpyre and Sienna has been replaced with a few generic placeholders just shouting 100 variations of "for the Emprah" or "heresy!" That, and the physical customization is fairly limited.

- Enemy targeting on the player is broken. Plenty of videos exist of grunts ice skating across the battlefield to strike the player in the back.

- Other than the Ogryn, the 3 human classes really meld together, with lots of cross-weapon usage. Besides their single career skill, they feel very similar to each other, a lot moreso than Verm.

- Tomes and Grims randomly spawn so carrying them is not the only challenge, but finding them in some hidden corner of the poorly lit environment. They are a random modifier and not guaranteed either.

- I have not reached full level with any class yet, but there is more randomization in the weapon stats other than just the "Power" property of Verm. Stats like cleave, handling, and damage are randomized going up the ranks so your new more expensive weapon can do more damage but hit fewer targets, and things to that effect. The melee handling at times can feel especially poor because of this, a lot of weapons taking notably longer to chain or block-cancel than even level 1 of Vermintide.

- Not too clear on the specifics, but players have claimed they've mined or at least strongly inferred a lot more aggressive avenues of monetization than even Vermintide 2, which could be predatory at times already.

- I know this is more subjective, and I hesitate to criticize it because I know a lot of people love 40k, but I've never seen a setting where Flanderization is more intrinsic to the IP. The constant "let's be as edgy and foul as possible" tone and world-building is extremely grating, and especially so when they've doubled down on the story element of this game compared to Verm. Most of the character dialogue boils down to "I LOVE THE EMPEROR I LOVE THE EMPEROR I LOVE THE EMPEROR."

OVERALL:
Maybe the tech and optimization problems of this game will go from 90% bad to 30% bad like they have with Vermintide 2, but I don't see the huge loss of content or the sloppy "sorta ranged but not really" combat core becoming much better without a total rework of the game. If Darktide's future is like Verm 2's development cycle, it'll probably consist of a lot of pay-gated content and months-to-years between major fixes... but 40k fans will buy anything so this is all on deaf ears.

Some goofy fun. It could have been a classic if the mechanics weren't so shallow.

+ Looks absolutely gorgeous. The graphics and the art direction are stupid-good for their time.
+ Acting and cinematics are surprisingly high production.
+ Story is coherent enough to serve the action. Very embellished but enjoyable set pieces.
+ Combat PRESENTATION is very visceral and the sound work is great.
+ The Gladiator mode has a surprising amount of content to it and will give you a lot to do if you actually enjoy the core game.
+ They did about the best they could to give the enemies "classes" to vary their combat performance.
+ Most game systems don't have a lot to them but they switch between them with enough frequency that they're somewhat entertaining. There's a Testudo formation minigame that I found very simple but enjoyable.
+ You get to kill Commodus.

+- Historical accuracy is barely a suggestion. About all this game has in common with real life is that there's a place called Rome and some of its characters share names with people who existed.

- Obvious console port. You CAN'T REMAP CONTROLS! I can't even find a mod or .ini that will let me do it. You have to choose one of 3 present patterns. The beautiful environments are often concealed by the nauseating console FOV.
- Core combat is very shallow. You get one attack and one stun with pretty inconsequential Heavy variants of each. You get one parry and one dodge. Even in shallow but flashy games like Arkham or Assassin's Creed you can parry multiple enemies at once but in this game they just attack one at a time.
- Game exhaustively relies on its "execution" system. Low-health enemies can be isolated for a QTE where your total bonus depends on if... you hit RMB or LMB at the correct timing... It gets old quick and seems like a showy way to make up for lack of combat depth. You need to do these constantly for combat bonuses, especially in multiplayer.

OVERALL: The campaign is about 5 hours of Romeaboo camp that's fun enough if you turn your brain off, and the co-op mode was interesting enough to screw around in a bit. If the controls were rebindable and the core combat more fleshed out and satisfying, I'd definitely be playing this a lot.

The game deleted my save after my first 3 hours. Pathetically amateurish bug.
Troubleshooting this it appears to be a pretty common issue. The dev "solution" to this was just allowing a cheat to unlock all levels and tools, completely making progress and money irrelevant.

Don't buy until they figure out how to add manual saves or functional autosaves in 2022.

Poorly optimized tech demo, but there are a few privileges for longtime Vermintide fans.

I used the Quest 2 so the controls are wonky and your hands are literally backwards. I followed the .ini guide to get rid of the awful blurriness, and it helped, but it still is heavily prevalent.
The "game" is a generic stagnant shooting gallery where the only real usable weapon is the Repeater Pistol. Unfortunately there's only limited teleport move tool as well.

Now, it IS free, so I recommend for the sole purpose of seeing these familiar characters up close. It's intimidating how big the Skaven are when they get right in your face on the Reikwald level, and to see how chunky the Repeater is in real-life scale is very interesting.
The best part, and frankly woefully underdeveloped, is the Red Moon Inn. Seeing characters I've spent thousands of hours with as if they're real people is just surreal. Their proportions and textures make them seem like real people. The Inn has the same problem as the levels in that you can only teleport to predetermined spots. This tech demo would have been amazing if you could walk around the Red Moon and watch the heroes in their daily routine.

Don't bother with this as a "game," but as a brief gallery it's very cool and I wish there was more to look at.